Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (30 page)

For twenty-four years ago I had seen that same scene, that very same scene, of a bride and a groom coming out of the door of a church.
What
was it telling me?
Where
had I seen it? The answers danced into my head.
It was telling me about killing people dead, and I’d seen it in a French film—a sinister François Truffaut film—called
The Bride Won Black! The Bride Wore Black,
starring Jeanne Moreau, whose husband was shot at the church on their wedding day.
The Bride Wore Black,
with Jeanne Moreau avenging herself on the men who had done the deed.
The Bride Wore Black,
where Jeanne Moreau, using five clever techniques, methodically murders the men who had murdered her husband.

I remembered every detail of every murder.

The second man was killed with a poisoned drink, a method which—remember?—I’d tried already.

The fifth was stabbed to death—too sordid for me.

And number four, a bit esoterically, was executed with a bow and arrow.

The first of Jeanne Moreau’s victims, however, had perished when she pushed him off a terrace. This Watergate condo had a terrace too, a terrace with a crenellated concrete waist-high barrier on which a man could quite easily climb and from which he could quite easily jump—or be pushed.

Now it’s true that I had initially abjured anything so directly hands-on violent. But with time running out and my dear Wally’s life in danger, I was starting to think a bit less fastidiously. Like Jeanne Moreau, I would have to consider a fatal shove from the terrace a definite option. A definite option. But not, let’s face it, my favorite.

My favorite option and clearly—as I checked out the condo, found what I wanted, and ran through my plan a few times—the best way to go was the way Jeanne Moreau had murdered her third victim.

Yes, that was the way to go. It was simple and
certain, involved no blood, and was considerably less violent than shoves off terraces.

Now that I knew what to do, it was time to get the hell out of Mr. Monti’s apartment. But Mr. Garcia Fuentes would be back.

Before I left, I paused to review my Garcia Fuentes disguise in the living-room mirror, smoothing my mustache and tucking my hair into my cap. I slightly loosened my coverall straps so no hint of a bosom marred my manly form. It struck me as I studied myself, that I looked like Charlie Chaplin when he played a factory worker in
Modern Times.
I looked like Charlie Chaplin, but when I practiced speaking aloud, I was Charlie being dubbed with a—well, it’s difficult to characterize this accent.

“I’m a come-a feex-a you kitchen, mon,” I said to the reflection in the mirror. “The management send me up here. I’m a-gonna to paint you cabinets a leetle beet.”

“In that case I’m glad I caught you,” said a darkly familiar voice from the front hall. “There’s a couple of other places that need some patching.”

•  •  •

A year ago, in the midst of my my-life-is-about-to-be-two-thirds-over pre-birthday crisis, I was in New York having lunch with my sister Rose. “Don’t you ever worry,” I asked when we got to the key lime pie (one slice; two forks), “about dying?”

Rosalie put down her fork. “If that’s what we’re talking about at lunch, then you are the one who is picking up this check.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So tell me—do you?”

“No,” answered Rose. “And now can we change the subject?”

“But, Rose,” I persisted, “all of the women on Mom’s side of the family died at the fairly young age of sixty-nine. Which means—and honey, I don’t intend in any way to upset you—that you might have only ten and a half years left.”

Rosalie laughed a mirthless laugh. “I canceled an appointment with my chiropodist. I was going to have an ingrown toenail removed. I canceled the appointment because I—hah!—thought that lunch with you would be more fun.”

“Rose,” I beseeched my sister, “answer the question.”

Rose leaned back in her chair and said, “Honey, I don’t intend in any way to upset you. But you look exactly like Mom, so I guess you take after her side of the family, genetically speaking. And I look like all of Dad’s sisters, especially Pearl.” She sipped her Earl Grey tea. “And since Aunt Pearl is almost ready to get birthday greetings from Willard Scott on the
Today
show, I’ll start worrying about death when I’m around ninety.”

I nodded in silence at her flawless logic. Then I picked up my fork and attacked the key lime pie. “Oh, well,” I said when I’d finished every morsel. “I still have twenty-three years and four months left.”

“No,” Rose said. “You’ll live longer than that. You’ll figure something out. Here”—she called to our waitress—‘I’ll take that check.” She cast me a comforting smile. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. You may have bad genes but, Bren, you’re so resourceful.”

•  •  •

You’re so resourceful, I told myself, when I heard Mr. Monti’s voice in the front hall.

Pressing my mustache firmly in place and pulling my cap down low, I resourcefully rushed to the kitchen and started painting.

•  •  •

“I no expecta you home, mon,” I said, when Mr. Monti joined me in the kitchen and poured himself an eight-ounce glass of milk.

“Yeah, well, my gut started acting up. The docs think I’m getting an ulcer. I had to cancel the rest of my day and come home.” He took of his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and stared broodingly into his milk. “Did I say home? Hey, that’s a laugh.
This
place isn’t home. My wife took my home and left me with this ulcer.”

I put down my brush, raised my eyes toward the heavens, and waggled my mustache up and down sympathetically. “Ai, women,” I said. “They treat us vary bahd.”

(I won’t do the accent anymore, but imagine, please, an Italian Desi Arnaz, with just a smidge of West Indian thrown in.)

Joseph Monti waved his hand. “Keep painting,” he said. “Keep painting. For eighteen bucks an hour or whatever you guys are raking in these days, you can paint and have a discussion at the same time.”

I dipped my brush in the paint and resumed the painting.

Mr. Monti, sipping his milk with obvious distaste, announced, “Here’s my philosophy of life. You work to get what you want. And when you get what you want, you keep it. Whatever you have to do”—he slapped his hand down hard on the table—“you do to keep it.”

“Absolutamente,”
I said, and kept painting.

“And if your enemy takes it from you,” Mr.
Monti continued, “you squash turn like a bug and then you tear out his liver and feed it to the gizzards.”

I decided I wouldn’t point out that the word he wanted was
buzzards,
not
gizzards.
Nor did I plan to ask him if bugs had livers.
Positivamente,”
I replied to his remarks, and kept painting.

Mr. Monti stared at some vision beyond the kitchen walls, some vision of vengeance too monstrous for me to imagine. “Soon,” he rasped. “Without any mercy. I will be striking soon.”

I shuddered silently. And I kept painting.

•  •  •

Two hours later Joseph Monti was still at the kitchen table, complaining about his life and cursing his enemies. I had finished painting two kitchen walls. I’d also tried to leave several times—“You’re sick. I come back later. I come back tomorrow”—but Mr. Monti insisted that I remain. He insisted that I remain and keep on painting while he kept muttering things like “She threw me out of the house.” And “How could this happen to me?” And, most unnervingly, “I’ll tear out his liver.”

Not if I can stop you, I thought. But first I needed a hammer and nails and some masking tape. Without them, I couldn’t do him in that day. Besides, with my muscles aching—throbbing and burning and twitching and aching—from my unexpected workout with the walls, I didn’t have the strength to commit a murder.

“No more paint!” I finally—thank God!—had an exit line that Mr. Monti would buy. “I go get more and come, back early tomorrow.”

“Be here before I leave for work,” Mr. Monti told me. “I’ll show you these other places I want you to patch.”

“Absolutamente
,” I said. “I be here before you leave.
Absoluta
- and
positivamente
.”

•  •  •

During the afternoon I went to the store and purchased another can of white semigloss, though I had no intention of doing any more painting. I did, however, expect to make full fatal use of my other purchases: the roll of tape, the hammer, and the nails. But my plan to return in the early
A.M.
and do to Mr. Monti what Jeanne Moreau had done to victim three was thwarted—temporarily—by circumstances beyond even my control.

•  •  •

Groans awoke me at five that morning, terrible kicked-in-the-stomach gasping groans, oh-god-oh-help-me groans that came from the room above my head—from Wally’s room. (Needless to say, Jake snored at my side, undisturbed.) I flew up the stairs, convinced that Joseph Monti had somehow gotten to my boy, though the green letters on the panel of our security system still read “all secure.” When I reached the third floor I found no suggestion that anyone had breached our electronic fortress, (I didn’t even find Jeff, who was out for the night with, I figured, another unsuitable babe.) Wally was up there alone. He was writhing and thrashing on his bed. His face was soaked with sweat and contorted with pain.

“Mom,” he moaned, “I’m hurting so bad. You’ve got to do something, Mom. You’ve got to do something.”

I put my hand on his forehead. It was on fire.

“Jake,” I roared in a voice that I had cultivated for major domestic emergencies, a voice that could waken the dead—and sleeping mates. Faster than the speed of light, my husband the doctor arrived at Wally’s bedside.

One phone call and two minutes later, the three of
us—Jake and Wally and I—were on our way in Jake’s Volvo to Sibley Hospital. And at 9
A.M.,
after whispering, “I guess maybe Jo should know about this,” Wally had an emergency appendectomy.

•  •  •

While Wally was having surgery and Jake rushed off to Children’s to perform some urgent surgery of his own, I went to a phone booth and made a number of calls. To Josephine, as Wally had requested. To Jeff, except he had not, as yet, returned home. To Dwayne’s mother, who, upon hearing that Wally wouldn’t be seeing his clients for a while, took full responsibility for his appendix. And to Mr. Monti’s office, where I explained to his secretary that though Mr. Fuentes had not showed up today, he would be at the condo early on Friday morning. Indeed, though I was aware that it might be hard to get away, I
had
to be at the condo on Friday morning. Halloween, after all, was Saturday.

Jo arrived at Sibley while Wally was still in the O.R. Birdie, looking ten years younger, was with her. “Family should stick together,” she said, explaining her presence in the visitors’ lounge. “Your boy is a lovely boy, and I’ll count him as family until Jo returns his ring.”

Josephine bit her lip and wandered off to stare out a window. Birdie joined me on the tan vinyl bench. “I guess with how mean my husband’s been about the kids’ engagement, you wouldn’t mind so much if she broke it off.”

Mean? I said to myself. She’s calling him “mean”? How about “vicious,” “evil,” “homicidal”? Aloud I murmured mildly, “We all love Josephine. But I guess right now she’s deep into self-discovery.”

Birdie Monti laughed. “Self-discovery, yes! I left Joseph over Josephine’s self-discovery.”

Even though Birdie Monti was about to become a widow, I felt strangely compelled to set the record straight “I honestly think,” I said, “that your husband never did anything sexually inappropriate. I mean”—I hastened to add—“as far as Jo or your other daughters are concerned.”

Birdie nodded. “We know that now. At first we were kind of confused. Until the doctor explained to Jo, and Jo explained to me, that the problem”—Birdie paused, then dived in—“was not her father’s unconscious incestuous yearnings, which, Dr. X says, even nice people have. She said that the problem was his larger pathology.”

My jaw dropped as Birdie swam briskly through these dark psychological waters. I cleared my throat and inquired, “Larger pathology?”

“That’s right,” said Birdie calmly. “His narcissistic need for control and domination.”

I couldn’t, I thought, have put it better myself.

Wally’s green-suited surgeon came out to the lounge to tell us that everything had gone well and that Wally was now being monitored in the recovery room. “Strong lad. No complications. He can go home on Saturday morning. And with this laser surgery, he’ll be back in business within a week to ten days.”

Birdie hugged me hard. “Oh, Brenda,” she said, “I’m so happy that Wally’s okay. Thank God.”

Hugging her in return, I prayed to To Whom It May Concern that this lovely lady would also be okay.

For despite (or because of) the fact that I was her husband’s former lover and future murderess, I was
feeling responsible for Birdie. And despite her stellar performance that September night at AFGO, I still worried about how well she would do on her own. But as we. Continued talking together that morning at Sibley Hospital, I realized that my concerns were quite misplaced. Her contentment, her composure, and her quiet self-possession made Gloria Steinem look like a co-dependent.

“So,” I said to her, deeply relieved that I wouldn’t have her unhappiness on my conscience, “I guess you’re not planning to get back together again.”

“Planning to get back together again? Oh, I can live without him. I can live without him very well.” She smiled somewhat abashedly. “Except—and you know, they never talked about this at AFGO—I sometimes worry that Joseph can’t live without
me.”

Birdie stood up to leave, patting her thick dark hair into place with one well-jeweled hand. She walked to the window and said goodbye to Jo. Then, bending to peck my cheek, she whispered, “I want to tell you something before I go. I don’t think it’s right that Joseph took Jeff’s condominium.”

“It may not be right, but it’s legal,” I said. “A contract is a contract. And Jeff signed over his life to Monti Enterprises.”